The Beginning is The End is the Beginning
by Random Username
Summary: Edward is forced to re-live Bella's first day in school over and over again, until he makes it right. At least that is what he thinks. AU, rated M for some imagery and concepts.


Disclaimer: All the recognizable characters, settings, and concept belong to Stephenie Meyer and a pretty well-known movie someone else came up with. Also there's a phrase in there that's shamelessly stolen from Vladimir Nabokov.

**The Beginning is The End is the Beginning**

_Day One, 5am_

He was running through the woods. Far from home, far from any civilization. Where it was finally quiet: no voices, no thoughts, just the wind through the trees, small animals burrowing themselves into the cold ground, a leaf falling. He had to stop running to turn back and pretend for yet another day to be a just a normal boy, going to school, eating his lunch, enjoying his youth, going through the motion.

He believed that for someone eternally young youth was impossible enjoy. But he didn't know eternity. But on that first day he didn't known anything yet.

It was a day just like any other - save for the young girl at school, seventeen – just like he was and wasn't – and silent aside from the tempting rush of her sweet blood running through her veins, being pumped through her heart. A distant drum, tempting him forever.

He tried to distract himself from killing her, and killing twenty other children while he was at it, by focusing on something else. He remembered the sound of the sea, the sound of his own blood, coming from a seashell pressed against his ear, a hundred years ago, when he was a child.

That day he tried to be good and so he ran. But once the clock turned to five in the morning again, he found himself in a familiar forest, not that far from, not far from any civilization. The woods were not as quiet as the girl's thought would be on this day again, her first day in a new school again. Only this time, he failed to be good.

_Day Three, 3pm_

Again he stood amid carnage of a destroyed classroom. The young girl, Bella, was dead again. So was their teacher and twenty seventeen-year olds for whom this was supposed just another day at school. His sibling stared at him, horrorstruck. But worried less about the carnage and more about of his calm. He knew that they would have been assuaged by a show of guilt. This was how it had been yesterday after all. Maybe he would have give them that would be tomorrow.

_  
Day Seven, 6am_

He didn't even wait for school that day. He went to the Chief's house and climbed through her bedroom window. He took a breath, a sweet scent washed over him and killed her with so little hesitation that she had barely time to wake up and scream.

He didn't bother silencing her before she died. Chief Swan's blood turned out to be not quite as sweet.

_Day Fifteen, 5pm_

For the first time in two week, his eyes didn't glow red in the afternoon. He hadn't killed anyone that day, this day, all day, and he doubted he would. After painting the town red he started to look for an escape.

_Day One-Hundred and Two, 9pm_

As easy as it was for him to escape the place, he couldn't find a way to escape the time. He spent a lot of money and little time (a lot of time) buying airplane tickets to exotic locales and found himself back into his neck of the woods every morning. He used his connections, old degrees and old identities to ask any physicist he could find about an ever-repeating day, not bothering to disguise that he was living it. There was little point in secrecy, they would not remember. And soon it became clear there that they would never remember long enough to help.

_Day Two-Hundred and Thirty-Two, 3am_

He had asked the Volturi exactly two times for their help. The first time he had asked for their knowledge. They told him they would get back to him. Tomorrow.

The second time they destroyed him and for a tiny pocket in time the world was quiet behind his eyelids. But then he heard the sound the wind, the small animals, a leaf falling.

_The day he stopped counting, 5pm_

He figured that if there was an answer, if there was an escape, it could only be found in the place and time he found himself every morning.

It took him a thousand days to root up every tree, to hunt down every animal, to chase the wind, to turn every leaf in this place. He burned down the forest to the ground, once, thrice, countless times without ever finding an answer.

_3pm_

He went back to school. He stopped looking for answer. Sometimes he killed Swan girl but as the novelty taste of her blood wore off he began to let her live. Sometimes he talked to her and he made her blush more often than not.

One day, he told her his big secret. Rosalie screeched into his ear later, protective of her family, of him even. "Let the Volturi come, " he said. "They have fifteen hours left." If they had come he would have welcomed them and that tiny moment of peace they would have.

The first time Bella, that was her name (it took him an eternity to learn), didn't believe him. That turned out be another day she didn't survive.

The second time he told her he was more convincing. Or maybe her body finally remembered the last of the many deaths it had gone through.

_8pm_

It took him another eternity to realize that her body remembered. Not her actual mind, quiet as it may be, but her body. The longer he knew her (it had been years, centuries even), the harder it became to make her blush, to make ashamed, to make her self-conscious. It was the only sign that time was passing outside of his mind.

_9pm_

He knew her quite well by now in some ways better than others. Her body felt familiar, he had made love to it a few times, his only companion in his circle of Hell. He could make her body remember but never her mind, never her soul. He figured that if he could, it wouldn't be Hell anymore.

_5am_

He had grown used to it. He had stopped trying to escape, to make people understand. For everyone else yesterday had been yesterday and not a day as far away as the birth of Christ. Once upon a time he had thought he knew about eternity, he had thought he knew about immortality but he had known nothing. And he still knew little else but his one day.

He woke up in the forest every morning and the wind went through the trees and somewhere out there a heart was beating that remembered the feeling of being torn from its breast, and a breast that would remember his caress and for him that was eternity.

_11pm_

He forgot about the time. He forgot that everyone expected another day to follow this one and he forgot the day that had been yesterday so long ago. Never and tomorrow became one and the same.

And then one day, same day as always, he lived just as he always did. He made her body remember with a slight touch and then seduced her mind nearly as quickly. There was little else to.

He knew her well. By then he had forgotten whether he ever not liked the novels she liked or if he ever was not in love with the things she said because they never were exactly the same. He seduced her mind and then he got her body back. Back to burrow himself into it like a small animal until he would find himself back running among them, on a rainy day in Forks five o'clock in the morning.

Only on this morning there was a tiny bit of peace and quiet, as if he had died again. And there in the darkness behind his closed eyelids he heard the sound of the wind in the trees, the sound of a distant drum, the small animals burrowing themselves in the ground, a leaf falling and the familiar sound of her blood. Like the seashell pressed against his ear a million years ago when he was a child.

_The end_

**"a million years ago when he was a child" is the phrase borrowed from Nabokov. I know I'm not worthy.**


End file.
